The First Time I Heard the Word: The “N‐Word” as a Present and Persistent Racial Epithet

Abstract

Abstract The main point of this paper is to interrogate the process of interpellation and to point to the prevalence of the process of “re‐production” of particular social formations in the contemporary United States where the racial epithet “nigger” continues to work as a mechanism of a persistent racial ideology. While several scholars have discussed the ways in which the Black body is hailed into being, a strict focus on the production of the racialized Black body overlooks the ways that whiteness depends upon this production and is therefore similarly (re)produced through the reproduction of the other (i.e. blackness). It is argued that first encounters with the “n‐word” have the power to discipline racial bodies by simultaneously hailing multiple racialized subjects into being and that this process is most productive during the early stages of youth. By drawing upon ethnographic data from a variety of ethnically and racially identified individuals, the author argues that this process may be common to all people within the United States, regardless of racial origin, and that the “n‐word,” as a racial epithet, continues to be used to situate racialized subjects on opposing sides of the “color line.”